The Art Institute of Chicago

America: History and Life

Provides bibliographic access to over 2,000 international, state and local history journals covering the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. For coverage of world history, excluding the United States and Canada, use Historical Abstracts.

Types of material covered: Journal articles, book reviews, and dissertations.
Dates covered: 1964 to the present.

Anthropology Plus

Combines Anthropological Literature, the citation database of Harvard University's Tozzer Library, with the British Museum's Anthropological Index, providing access to over 2,500 journals and edited works. Useful for African and Native American art.

Types of material covered: Journals, edited works, and monographic series.
Dates covered: Selected late 19th century literature to the present.

FRANCIS: International Humanities & Social Sciences

This multidisciplinary resource indexes over 4,200 journals covering the humanities (67%), social sciences (30%), and economics (3%), with abstracts for most records. Useful for Asian art.

Types of material covered: Serials, journal articles, books, book chapters, conference papers, French dissertations, exhibition catalogs, reports, etc.
Dates covered: 1984 to the present.

Historical Abstracts

Provides bibliographic access to over 2,000 international journals covering the history of the world from 1450 to the present (excluding the United States and Canada, which are covered in America: History and Life).

Types of material covered: Journal articles, book reviews, and international dissertations.
Dates covered: 1954 to present.

JSTOR

Provides full-text access to the back issues of hundreds of scholarly journals in the humanities and social sciences.

A list of journals is available via the JSTOR site.

Types of material covered: Journal articles
Dates covered: Dates of coverage vary; most journals' current 3-5 years are NOT included.
Technical tip: When emailing an article from JSTOR, first save it as a pdf on your desktop and then attach the pdf to your email.

Project MUSE

Provides full-text access to the entire Project Muse historical journal archive in the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

Types of material covered: Journal articles
Dates covered: Dates of coverage vary by journal; most current year may NOT be included.
Technical tip: When emailing an article from Project MUSE, first save it as a pdf on your desktop and then attach the pdf to your email.

LexisNexis Academic Universe

Full-text access to a broad range of sources covering news, business, legal, medical, and general reference research.

Types of material covered: Approximately 5,000 resources, including regional, national, and international newspapers, wire services, magazines, almanacs, biographical dictionaries, etc.
Dates covered: Dates of coverage vary from source to source. Newspaper coverage ranges from current year to 20+ years. Wire services and newspapers updated daily.

Academic Search Premier

Indexes scholarly and trade articles, many full text, in all academic subjects including: arts & literature, humanities, social sciences, education, computer sciences, language and linguistics, medical sciences, ethnic studies and more.

Types of material covered: Journal articles only.
Dates covered: 1975 to the present.

American Periodicals Series Online

Contains more than 1,100 historically-significant periodicals published between 1740 and 1900, including special interest and general magazines. Everything is available in full text.

Types of material covered: Full text American historical periodicals
Dates covered: 1740-1900

Contemporary Culture Index

A freely available index of Art periodicals and alternative press journals such as SMS, The Fox, Situationist Times, Grey Room, Critical Inquiry, and others. Requires registration to search.

Types of material covered: Journal articles
Dates covered: Dates vary depending on the periodical, but many go back to the 1960s.
Access note: Free access but registration required.

Dissertations and Theses

Provides access to citations and abstracts from all titles in the Digital Dissertations database. Titles published since 1997 have 24 page previews available. No full-text dissertations available.

Types of material covered: Masters and Ph.D theses.
Dates covered: 1861 to the present.

ECO Electronic Collections Online

Abstracts and some full text of a wide range of scholarly journals. Can be searched by publisher or subject collections—arts, history, geography, social sciences, political science.

Types of material covered: Journal articles.
Dates covered: 1995 to the present.

Essay and General Literature Index

Citations from collections of essays and miscellaneous works published in the United States, Great Britain, and Canada. Subjects covered: all areas of the humanities and social sciences.

Types of material covered: Essays and miscellaneous works
Dates covered: 1985 to the present

Film & Television Literature Index

Bibliographic and full-text database covering the all of television and film, including film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews.

Types of material covered: Journal articles only.
Dates covered: 1967 to present.

Film Literature Index (1976-2001)

Contains approximately 700,000 citations to film, television and video articles and reviews. You can search the citations or browse by subject headings, browse by person names, production titles, or corporate names.

Types of material covered: Journal and magazine articles, film and book reviews.
Dates covered: 1976-2001

MLA Bibliography

Published by the Modern Language Association of America this database indexes international scholarly materials on modern language, literature, linguistics, and folklore, with over 1.3 million citations.

Types of material covered: Over 3,000 journals and series, monographs, dissertations, working papers and conference proceedings.
Dates covered: 1963 to the present.

EThOS

The British Library's electronic theses online service provides access to over 300,000 theses and dissertations. Many UK institutions support Open Access to their theses, so their digital and digitized theses are free to the researcher. A small number of participating institutions may not be able to offer Open Access and in this case the researcher may have to pay for the digitization.

 

Access note: Some content is fee based.

Getty Research Portal

An online search platform providing global access to digitized art history texts in the public domain. Through this multilingual, multicultural union catalog, scholars can search and download complete digital copies of publications for the study of art, architecture, material culture, and related fields.

Types of material covered: Digitized full text publications.
Access note: Free access. Available to everyone.